Let me say now that I will try and keep this brief because I know you dickheads either cant be assed reading or simply dont reply so I have no idea who actually cares about this shit.
Background:

Misaka Mikoto of Tokiwadai is a level 5 ability user (the highest known level) and is affectionately known as the Ace of Tokiwadai: Railgun. She has the ability to create and control electrical fields and that alone is an extremely useful skill but she takes it one step further by taking a common coin and forcing it to accelerate at horrendous speeds using her electrical field mastery…thus she is Railgun.

Misaka was introduced in To Aru Majutsu no Index…an anime I didn’t particularly enjoy but it had its charm I suppose. She was a sub character throughout the anime and I guess someone just thought: “Man people like this chick…lets make an entire anime out of it!” and you can almost guess that it would have notorious filler eps…which it does.

Anyway, Misaka lives in the Tokiwadai school dorms with Shirai Kuroko…a level 4 teleport user who is also crazily in love with Misaka and on many attempts she tries to make advances on her. Shirai is also a member of “Judgement” who are essentially the Police of Academy City (the city they live in). The story follows Misaka as she helps Shirai and judgement using her ability and they throw in Uiharu and Saten from another school nearby and you get a crazy team of young girls who are apparently the only ones that can save the city from total destruction.

The anime itself is pretty boring to be fair…I can’t honestly recommend it to anyone other than Index/Misaka fans. Here is my reasoning:

• Its just fanservice…Misaka and Shirai psuedo-lesbianism throughout the series with overly cliche characters everywhere.
• The story is thin…honestly the first bad boss helps defeat the last boss even though they tried to destroy the city.
• Cliche characters…seriously…as soon as the intro stops you should have been able to predict every single character.
• Uiharu has the worst power ever…its actually so bad its laughable…and no one explains the head-flowers.
• It sounds as if it was written on the fly…after episode 12 the whole series just falls apart and fillers hit from eps 13-19 and then suddenly they introduce and kill off a major bad guy in the last 4-5 eps.
• The ending sucks…After wasting 23 episodes watching crap, they finish it off with crap. Ugh.

I think I’ll leave this short ass review there, basically watch this anime if you are horribly bored and liked Index…other than that it simply isnt worth it.

Misaka is fucking cool though.

Rating: 7/10. Barely hits a 5 but gets 2 extra points for the fight scene in ep 12.

In unrelated news, I took a photo of my desk for a mate…and I might as well share it…check it out here

First and most importantly, the OP to the anime is fucking awesome. I have the song on my playlist because of the songs from Stepmania but I never knew where it was from until I fired up episode 1…and I came. Hard:

Anyway, let me point out quickly here that if you have not played Star Ocean: The second story and dont know that Celine loves Baby Rabbit Risotto, then don’t…I repeat, DONT, get this anime…It is very slow and tries to pad out 5 minute scenes in the game over 2 episodes BUT in being its downfall, the fact that it remains true to the games story makes it very fun to watch for Star Ocean fans. The first 3 episodes revolve around Claude getting owned by a teleporting machine then meeting Rena who is portrayed as a moebomb with an annoying voice…so…exactly the same as the game.

Some things in the story are over embellished and some are completely skipped. For example Mayor Regis is a ninja and tries to smash Claude in his sleep to see if he really is the warrior of light…but then he suddenly goes back to being a frail old man…which of course makes perfect sense. Then there’s Claudes raygun…get this:

Talk about extreme…just to kill that oversized gorrilla thing that attacks Rena in the forest.

The anime itself makes use of a hell of a lot of still frames…the animation is somewhat shoddy and in the still frame shots (obviously) completely missing, which is kinda annoying. In certain scenes, like when Claude chases after Alen once he steals Rena, the animation is very smooth but then straight away its back to still frames with voices thrown over top…Which not only downtrails any semblance of good animation pants, it also slows the anime down further.

Recognise this place?

Although this sounds like I’m just complaining about the anime, I still kinda like it. I’m not sure why but I can only think that its simply because I found an anime based on a game that tries to stay EXACTLY on the story instead of making some arbitrary side stories. I seriously doubt I’ll ever finish this anime though unless something changes by episode 9 (which is the last episode I have on my HDD) because when I get to this point, I then have to go find a torrent containing the next 15 episodes of an anime that no one really cares about.

So yea my final words are: Only get this anime if you liked Star Ocean…otherwise don’t, it’s too slow to warrant watching frequently.

Time to go watch Durarara!! Ep 3 methinks.

EDIT: The anime is now going off track and losing focus from the main story…Celine is a bitch and Rena is stupid…also:

New Zealand is a small place globally speaking, it can be pretty hard to find niche products and groups. I’m lucky in that I have a couple of pretty well stocked anime/manga/figures/more stores handy. But that comes with the issue that a niche product in New Zealand is going to come with a hefty price tag, I don’t have any comparisons on hand but take my word for it.

I came across a site that has a very detailed list of places in around here that sell our favored products, New Zealand Anime & Manga Shopping Guide.

Most of them I had come across before like locally here we have Pulsar Max and sadly they don’t have a web presence but they have a wide selection and can get things in if you ask for them, you pay for it though in the price as it’s not cheap and sometimes you would be better off buying from overseas yourself.

One that is fairly recent and not on that list is Overworld in Petone. A small store run by one guy just of the main street and mostly stocks mainstream stuff like Bleach and Naruto but it has some nice odd stuff and respectable prices to match.

When I read that we in NZ could use Amazon Japan I was ecstatic and went on a spree making wish lists of all and sundry (was also fun to see how much Japanese I could read).

So in the ever present future when I have money (aka not a student) it looks like I’ll have some catching up to do.

These lovely posters created by na-insoo (lineart) and starshock12 (colouring) nicely cover the base Kana and I can see myself refering to them in the future just for amusment as I learn. It would be nice if they offered them as prints in the DA shop but I guess we will just have to be content with these digital versions.